SeekFast

It can take too long to find a document on the hard drive, with the operating system's built-in search engine. In certain cases, it would be faster to search for new information online, than on the hard drive. If you wish to find local documents faster, SeekFast can help you. This appropriately named application is like Google, but for your documents. It can instantly locate Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs and other text files. The application also gives you the possibility of searching for specific words or fragments in multiple documents.

SeekFast is free to use, but you must purchase a license if you wish to remove certain limitations. Its setup file is almost 2 MB and it doesn't take more than a few seconds to install the application's core components on your computer. It works on Windows 2000 and all later versions and it asks only for 512 MB of RAM.

Instructions for using SeekFast are presented directly on the main user interface. You have to perform three simple actions to locate a document. First, you must target a folder on your hard drive, to narrow down the search, type in a keyword or a short phrase and hit a Search button. The software will instantly find all documents with names or contents that match your keywords. The best part is that SeekFast does not index files, so you can launch the application and start searching right away.

The search results are displayed in the largest area of the interface, like on a web browser. SeekFast returns several results for each file. The first result is the file itself, displayed together with its full path, size and creation date. The following results are words or phrases that match your keywords. To prevent displaying too many results for one file, which can make it difficult to reach the next file, you can set the program to display a maximum number of results per file.

Clicking a found document will open it in its default application. Selecting a keyword, in the results list, will open the document, on the same interface. The selected keyword will be highlighted, to make it easier to spot. A secondary search function is available for the document's contents. It is similar to the search feature which can be found in any text editor. Just type a word in the appropriate input field and the software will highlight all identical words in the document.